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Some fantasy and horror from the Edinburgh Film Festival

While I was off enjoying a week at the Edinburgh International Film Festival naturally I sought out some of the SF&F and horror flicks in my feast of festival screenings. I was a bit busy going from movie to movie to do full write-ups, so thought instead I’d do a brief round-up of a handful that really made an impression on me. They’re still doing the international film festival circuit, so I have no idea when (or indeed if) they may get a general release, but do keep an eye out of them if they get a screening near you, especially Therapy For a Vampire and Liza the Fox Fairy, which are films I think anyone who loves fantasy will enjoy and which I think deserve some support (distributors, if you’re reading, these films all got big rounds of applause with the festival audiences, always a good sign, and well worth considering picking up for distribution):

Corin Hardy’s debut Irish Indy horror arrived with impressive credentials – it did well at the Sundance Festival, and Edinburgh’s own hugely respected horror flick fest Dead By Dawn (the UK’s longest running horror film festival) had selected it for the Edinburgh Film Festival (London peeps, I hear it is also getting a screening at Fright Fest this August). The central notion of a young, successful couple moving into the middle or rural nowhere and finding the surly locals to be less than welcoming is not a new one in horror, of course – film academics have filled many essays on the urban-rural horror tropes. But Hardy delivers some menacing, creepy rural locals here largely as a bit of a red herring. As Adam Hitchens (Joseph Mawle) and his wife (Bojana Novakovic) and infant move into a creaky old dwelling in the middle of an ancient bit of Irish forest, it isn’t long before things start happening. Things go bump in the night, strange leaks appears, stones are thrown and the nearest neighbour has made his loathing for them quite clear. But quite why the locals wish them gone and Adam’s forestry job to be axed (pardon the pun) isn’t terribly clear. It feels a little Straw Dogs – the isolated rural home, the disgruntled, hostile locals surrounding the incomers. But this changes quite quickly…

(Corin Hardy in a post-film Q&A at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, pic from my Flickr) After several incidents the police make a half-hearted investigation, although it is clear they really care little. But the local sergeant does let slip that some of the locals do – silly superstition, you understand – believe that these very old woods are home to very old beings, a form of the fair folk, pushed back millennia ago by the spread of the towns and cities of man to these few isolated woodland refuges. And they do not care for anyone trespassing on what is left of their territory, and if you cross into their borders then they have carte blanche to cross into your own space too. Naturally the Hitchens don’t believe this talk of of fairy belief at all (despite learning their unfriendly neighbour lost his young girl in the woods decades before, he maintains spirited away by odd beings – perhaps he’s not just unfriendly but worried their presence will disturb the area once more). Hardy slowly ratchets up the sense of unease and we, along with the Hitchens, start to realise perhaps it’s not badly behaved locals reacting to incomers but that there may well be something else in those woods. A something that’s now targetting their home, and most especially their baby… Despite the low budget Hardy and his team use their scant resources well, making maximum use of the locations and a tight script to generate ever increasing levels of suspense and tension. What elevates it above that classic rural horror though is weaving in multiple elements from Celtic myth and folklore into the tapestry, which gives it a nice Hellboy-ish vibe in places, using some nice, creepy, disturbing effects. And in an era where so many horror films seem to rely far too much on jump-shocks, “torture-porn” or over-gore for the sake of it (I have no problem with a bit of gore, but some weak film-makers rely on it to overcome poor storytelling) it’s always good to see someone putting the effort in to build atmosphere and let it permeate out into the audience – and also to trust their audience to go along with that slow-burn, rewarding approach. I saw this at a late night screening, with a packed festival audience, which is probably the best way to enjoy a good horror movie.

This Austrian flick was one of the first films I saw at the festival this year, and it pretty much ties with Hungarian fantasy Liza the Fox Fairy as my favourite festival movie this year. It’s Vienna, in the early 1930s, and the Count Geza von Közsnöm is having the vampiric equivalent of a mid-life crisis. He’s lost all his lust for life, the long, endless nights of immortality weighing down upon him till little seems worth it anymore. In fact he doesn’t even bite his victims any longer, he gets his (increasingly bolshie) “Renfield” henchman to bludgeon them on the streets of nocturnal Vienna then use blood donation equipment to siphon off his “claret” into a bottle. His wife – a proper 20s/30s vamp, both in the vampire sense but also in the period use of the word to mean a dark femme fatale – is also adding to his world-weary feeling. She’s also finding their vampiric condition a little restrictive and is tired of not being able to see herself (we see her patting her face with a powder puff in a vain attempt to catch a glimpse of her face in the mirror), and her endless demands to him each night of how is my hair?, how do I look tonight? is driving him to fantasies of staking her in her coffin. In desperation who does the vampire count turn to? Why to Sigmund Freud, of course! And perhaps the famous father of psychoanalysis can also help him with his other problem – Freud is collaborating with an up and coming young Viennese artist who is illustrating his book, just the person to send the countess to for a portrait. Naturally Freud doesn’t know they are vampires, he’s too busy analysing all of their problems as a scientific challenge and assumes her inability to see herself is a mental problem, not that she literally has no reflection. The artist, meanwhile is having problems of his own – his girlfriend is a thoroughly modern Millie (she even wears – gasp! – trousers!), but he has a troubling penchant for always painting her not as she is but as he wants her to appear (rather more “girly”), which understandably is not helping their relationship. And into this come the count and countess, and oh, while the countess is distracted with the artist and her portrait, the count is drawn to his girlfriend who bears a striking resemblance to his long lost love (beheaded by dervishes many years ago, I’m sure we’ve all had relationships end like that). If Woody Allen did a 1930s tale of crossed-wire romantic misunderstandings in Vienna with vampires it may look a little like this…
(Director David Ruehm talking after the Edinburgh International Film Festival screening of Therapy For a Vampire, pic from my Flickr)

The comedy-horror flows brilliantly, the 30s setting used nicely, both for style and also for referencing films (there is some lovely cinematography here) and art of the period, while there’s a fine lacing of various vampire myths through the story (such as the compulsion for counting small objects) and relating that to the emerging field of psychoanalysis (two different ways of understanding the human brain, one ancient, one new), and there’s a nice bit of relationship and gender stuff going on there too. The film is replete with lovely little details and references – the count, lying on the psychiatrist’s couch, a picture of middle-aged-man-misery, until Freud asks him when he was last happy, and as he talks of his lost love he starts to float upwards off the couch (Freud is too busy taking notes to see this), but as soon as they return to the subject of his wife, bang, straight back down on the couch (no prizes for guessing that that symbolised!). For every reference I picked up on though, I am sure there were several I missed – this is one of those films that will happily bear repeat viewings and deserves a wider audience. It also makes for a fine European shelf-mate to the Kiwi genius of What We Do in the Shadows.

It’s Hungary in the 1970s, but not quite – this is, as director Mészáros explained in a post-film Q&A, a slightly fantasy version – for starters the town looks like Budapest but isn’t (the name is slightly changed) and in his version of the 70s and all its tacky, beige style (or lack thereof) Hungary isn’t oppressed behind the Iron Curtain and a totalitarian Communist state but is enjoying the (sometimes dubious) pleasures of Capitalism. Which includes the Makky Burger chain of Japanese fast food diners, which is one of the few places Liza (Mónika Balsai) treats herself to with her swiftly diminishing pool of money. Liza is a nurse, engaged for several years now to look after the bed-bound wife of the late Japanese ambassador. From her elderly employer she’s picked up the Japanese language and a love for the literature and pop culture too – she endlessly, obsessively re-reads the same Japanese novel, especially a scene detailing a lonely woman who finds true love over the crab-burgers at Makky’s on her thirtieth birthday. And with Liza’s thirtieth imminent this isolated woman is convinced this is a Sign for her to follow for True Happiness. Leading her into a series of attempted liasons with mostly inappropriate suitors. And also to a series of bizarre accidental deaths which soon lead the police to suspect her…

Why the string of deaths? Ah, well, that, you see, will be Tomy Tani, the spectral form of a deceased 1950s/60s Japanese crooner. Her employer and Liza love his music, but only Liza actually sees him, and once her elderly employer is gone, leaving her the apartment as a thank you (cue jealousy from the family, who add their suspicions to the police’s), the ghostly Tomy is her only real companion. But is he just an invisible friend, a figment of her imagination conjured up by an unfilled woman to ease her isolation? Or is he a real supernatural entity? And if he is, is he really her smiling, singing friend? Or does he perhaps have his own motivations? What’s behind that smiley J-pop facade? Could it be he likes Liza to be so isolated, so he receives all her attention? Could it be that poor Liza is like the fox-fairy women of Japanese myth, lonely, craving love, but when they do sometimes find a man on their wanderings that man is usually doomed to die? Is she cursed?

(Károly Ujj Mészáros speaking after the screening of Liza, the Fox-Fairy, pic from my Flickr)

Imagine early-period Jean-Pierre Jeunet (around his Delicatessen era), but if he’d been Hungarian and with a penchant for (deliberately) bad 1970s style and with that delightful fusion of comedy and horror, the touching and the ludicrous, fantasy and real. The film glows with details – it’s clearly a labour of love, with much attention paid to making scenes appear just-so, using real locations, sets and some CG augmentation (which I have to say I didn’t really notice, it was blended in well, and being on a tiny budget took the film-makers months to complete in post-production), giving the film a particular, individual look, feel and even sense of light that’s jsut pitch-perfect. An absolute delight of a film, which deserves a cult following.

I should also give a quick shout out for Simon Pummell’s British-Irish-Dutch co-production Brand New-U, another film working with a small budget and overcoming it by the use of some clever science fiction elements, which despite the five minutes into the future type of setting does what most good SF does, and uses those tropes to address the concerns of today – relationships and identity becoming mere commodities and services we purchase like a new smartphone or holiday thinking they will solve everything. And Takashi Yamakazi’s first in a series adapting the popular Japanese manga horror Parasyte was another late night slice of fun, some bonkers J-Horror, riffing on post-Croneberg body horror (intelligent parasitical creatures taking over humans) and also, by dark reflection, on the nature of human relationships in busy, urban city settings, “pod-people” given a J-Horror twist.